Situating Critical Realism
Situating Critical Realism
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批判现实主义的定位
DOI：
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发表时间：
2007
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Chris D. Brown
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作者：
Chris D. Brown
批判现实主义是国际关系理论的“下一个大思想”吗？[1]国际关系理论的历史表明，话语倾向于发现那些承诺解决我们所有问题的大思想，但实际上它们的寿命相当短。批判现实主义是不是另一个序列？或者，更宏大地说，批判现实主义是否会产生我们的另一场“大辩论”--第五次大辩论有点姗姗来迟，也许它可以由批判现实主义产生？让我们希望不会，因为前四次大辩论都是毫无意义的事情，而第五次，当它到来时，也不太可能有任何不同。幸运的是，本论坛的三篇论文中的每一篇都否认有任何产生国际关系理论的意图-相反，每一篇论文都旨在澄清这种理论的哲学前提，这是一项任务，在很大程度上，通过传统的过程来解释其他人试图沿着这条路线走下去的错误。这也是为什么大多数对华尔兹和温特的批评也是错误的。这三篇论文之间有一些不同之处--我稍后会谈到这些不同之处--但我觉得，这还不足以证明我有理由花4,000字来比较和对比他们对这个问题的处理方法。相反，我在这里想做的是试图解释批判实在论，确定批判实在论思想在过去30年中在社会科学中所扮演的角色，然后看看这三篇论文如何融入我将要描绘的画面。简而言之，我想论证的是，尽管批判现实主义既不是下一个大思想，也不是一个适合进行大辩论的主题，但它可能在重振过去20多年来被不公正地忽视的思想传统方面发挥重要作用。为了展开这一论证，我需要把批判实在论置于两种截然不同的话语背景中。我将开始简要地看一看批判现实主义的起源，在罗伊Bhaskar的反应，在哲学的发展，
Is critical realism the ‘next big idea’ in International Relations theory?1 The history of IR theory suggests that the discourse is prone to discovering big ideas which promise to solve all our problems, but which actually turn out to have rather short life spans. Is critical realism another in the sequence? Or perhaps, rather more grandly, will critical realism generate another of our ‘great debates’ – the Fifth Great Debate is somewhat overdue and perhaps it could be generated by critical realism? Let us hope not, because the first four great debates were singularly pointless affairs, and the fifth, when it arrives, is unlikely to be any different. Fortunately, each of the three papers in this forum denies any intent to produce a theory of International Relations – instead each aims to clarify the philosophical preconditions for such a theory, a task which it undertakes, for the most part, by the traditional process of explaining what is wrong with other people’s attempts to go down this route.2 Thus we have accounts of why Waltz is wrong, why Wendt is wrong, and why most of the critics of Waltz and Wendt are also wrong. There are some differences between the three papers – and I’ll come to those later – but not enough, I feel, to justify devoting the 4,000 words I have been allocated for comparing and contrasting their approaches to the subject. Instead, what I want to do here is to offer an attempt to situate critical realism, to identify the role critical realist thought has played in the social sciences in general over the last three decades, and then to see how these three papers fit into the picture I am going to paint. In brief, I want to argue that although critical realism is neither the next big idea, nor a fit subject for a great debate, it might perform an important role in reinvigorating a tradition of thought which has been unjustly neglected for the last twenty years or more. In order to develop this argument I need to place critical realism in the context of two rather different discourses. I will begin by looking briefly at the origins of critical realism in Roy Bhaskar’s reaction to developments in the philosophy of